The Day I Walked Out of the Dugout

That night, for the first time in years, I picked up the telephone and called Joel Brannock. I asked if I could say something at the opening. He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “You don’t have to, Coach.”

“I know I don’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m going to.”

Registration opened on a Thursday. Joel put a folding table outside the feed store with a coffee can and a clipboard, and by Saturday noon there were fifty-three names on it.

Joel, who had said forty-one, stood staring at the clipboard. Then he put his hand over his eyes.

We practiced three evenings a week, and I taught what I had taught every boy for twenty-two years: eyes up, feet soft, the ball will tell you where it is going if you let it. And I taught something new.

One evening Joel and I stood in center field with the sun low over the quarry rim, and I hit fly balls into the glare to a boy with a glove, and showed him how to shade his face and find the ball at the edge of the light.

We made the first rule we ever wrote down. Every center fielder gets a flip-down visor, and every practice we run what we call the glare drill, because the sun is not going away, and a kid ought to know how to stand inside it.

Opening day was the fourth Saturday of April, sixty-four degrees and clear. We scheduled the first game for ten in the morning, so there would be no glare and no excuse.

They came. I had not expected so many. By nine-thirty the new bleachers were full and people stood three deep along the fence.

Lavonne Spriggs, who ran the hair salon on Main Street and whose boy I had coached in 1998, stood behind the concession window in an apron, and the smell of hot dogs drifted across the bowl of the quarry.

My hands were trembling so hard I put them in my pockets.

Joel thanked the feed store and the fire department and the families. He said the league was free and would stay free. Then he looked over at me and held out the fire department’s bullhorn.

“Coach Tovey has a few words,” he said. “And then he’s got the first pitch.”

I walked out to the pitcher’s mound with two hundred pairs of eyes on me. Some of them, I knew, had been in those bleachers eighteen years before.

I took the bullhorn in a hand that did not feel like mine, and for a long moment I could not make a sound.

Then I said, “Some of you know me. For twenty-two years I was the coach here. And on the last Saturday of June, eighteen years ago, I did something on this field that I have not been able to put down since.”

The field went very quiet. Somebody’s baby fussed and was hushed.

“I lost a ballgame,” I said. “A boy dropped a fly ball, and I took my own disappointment and put it on him. I screamed at an eleven-year-old child in front of every one of you.

I told him to get off my field. I want to say this clearly, so nobody wonders. It was not his fault. It was mine, and I have been hiding from it ever since.”

I turned my head. Joel was at home plate with his catcher’s mitt on his hand, and Teddy stood next to him, holding his father’s belt loop.